Monthly Archives: May 2014

The 15 minute forum tonight was led by our Head of English, Kate Bloomfield. Kate started the forum by reminding us of the unfortunate labels that are often used to describe people who get cross about the use of poor grammar (I hope there’s none in this article!?) e.g.

Grammar Fascists!

Grammar Police!

Grammar Nazis!

We were then treated to this by Mitchell & Webb:

Now whilst this may be seen (by some) as an extreme reaction, it’s important that we don’t ‘dumb down’ the importance of grammar. We need it in order to communicate effectively – and so o our students. For the same reason, we need to use ‘Standard English’ i.e. using standard English words to communicate. This was illustrated using the following task. We were asked to look at the picture below and then describe to a partner, how to ride a bike, without using the words…